Tool: Language

Human spatial cognition and learning can be greatly influenced by the symbol systems we use to represent and communicate about space. In particular, spatial language—by far the most ubiquitous of all our external representational systems—can enhance spatial cognition in several ways. Spatial language encodes space in categorical terms and emphasizes qualitative divisions of space rather than metric properties. Spatial language thus can invite qualitative categories that guide spatial reasoning. Spatial language provides tools for labeling spatial relations and focuses attention on patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Moreover, spatial language can form an abstract system that permits analogical extensions of spatial representations to other domains.